The Moonlight Project has been working on an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight technology. Now they have released the first preview of Moonlight 2.0, incorporating some Silverlight 3.0 features.

The preview release of Moonlight 2.0, (officially version 1.9.0), was announced by Miguel de Icaza on his blog. The plugin will enable the viewing via Mono VM of content created with Silverlight 2.0 on both the 32 and 64 bit versions of the Firefox browser.

Moonlight 2.0 is not yet feature complete and some security features are completely absent so anyone who wants to try it should do so in a safe environment. Problems will also be found when trying to install XPI files. The "Preview Release Codec Notice" box on the website has more details.

More info about the latest modifications is available in the changelog. Some of the functions found in Silverlight 3.0 are already included: SaveDialog support (to save Silver content) and a few simple functions to create animations. Version 2.0 runs in the CoreCLR Sandbox, comes with a deep zoom and supports Microsoft's open-sourced control elements. Adaptive streaming is also supported.

Moonlight developers are testing their plugin on a long list of websites that use Silverlight and appointing ratings for individual website support. Intended to become a Microsoft alternative to Adobe's Flash, pages that use the technology are few and far between. The Moonlight 2.0 download is available here.

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